The Magic Frame: Your Workspace

One of the things that, in my view, a fairly important ritual, is to set your workspace and then modify it slightly as you go along.

You don’t see all the filters, because some of them are visible only in the drop down menu. However, this is only the Topaz set that is visible only from the drop down menu.

I use Nik, and I use DXO. I love both of them, and I must say that I am ambivalent about the Topaz set.

From an HDR perspective, the two that I use most often are Aurora HDR (only for Mac) and the HDR Tool in Lightroom.

What you see on the left, are a whole column of Actions. Most of them are the Adobe actions, which I loaded by error, but have been too lazy to remove. There are a few actions that I have created, like the trademark signs. I need to create, possibly 6 more of them. Wow. I have two for resizing photos, and I use this when I have to resize photos in bulk.

I may create a few for B&W conversions as well. Over time, I will create a few new actions.

On the right, what you see (moving from left to right), is the tools palette. Will this expand in the future? Possibly yes.

The next is a luminosity panel, which I have been experimenting with over the last two days. This is quite brilliant actually. I have to thank Laura Macky for this one, to be very honest.

Finally, on the right, you see the layers, the histogram etc. I did have a panel for the adjustment layers, but now I access them either from the luminosity panel, or from the menu bar at the bottom.

The picture that you see is one from Vrindavan. I first processed a batch of them in Aurora, and then I did the final processing using the luminosity panels.

My background, as you can see, is a dark grey. I like this, because it does not interfere with the colours – whether I am working with black & white, or whether I am working with colour.

In general, the workspace needs to be something that you create for yourself. It does need to reflect how you work, and the tools that you use the most often need to be accessible to you.

I use onOne a lot. Nik just sits there because I can almost all it does faster in LR. I tried the luminosity panel but wasn’t using the free one so didn’t buy the full version. I don’t like all the colors in your panels. They would distract me from analyzing the colors in my photographs.